Forging a Neuroscience Community: A Brief History of the Neurosciences Research Program

Abstract

Less than fifteen years ago the word neuroscience, and the multidisciplinary research effort that it denotes, did not exist. If any one man can be credited with the concept and genesis of neuroscience, a field uniting historically disparate disciplines concerned with brain structure and function and behavior, it is Francis O. Schmitt. His vision of neuroscience took shape and substance in 1962 with the founding of the Neurosciences Research Program (NRP), a new type of scientific organization that has sought to implement Schmitt’s convictions about how the complex problem of understanding central-nervous-system functions, particularly conscious cognitive behavior, might be most fruitfully approached. The history of the NRP thus is a core chapter in the brief history of neuroscience (as distinct from the long history of work on mind, brain, and behavior), a chapter that relates how a scientific community was forged and that offers a picture of that community’s structure and the dynamics of its scientific endeavors.